Investing in semiconductor startups is something Silicon Catalyst knows a lot about. During a time when venture funding for chip companies all but disappeared, this remarkable organization built a robust incubator, ecosystem, support infrastructure and funding source. Silicon Catalyst has assembled a top-notch management… Read More
A User View of Efabless Platform: Interview with Matt Venn
A few months ago, SemiWiki published an interview of Mike Wishart, CEO of Efabless. That interview provided insights into Efabless vision and its platform strategy. If you haven’t already read that post, please refer to it for background details. In essence, Efabless is about democratization of chip design and manufacturing.… Read More
5 Talks on RISC-V
Veriest recently hosted a webinar focusing on RISC-V as a forerunner of ongoing open-source revolution in chip design. Speakers were distinguished professionals from industry and academia. Webinar covered topics from market trends to open-source hardware initiatives, tools and methodologies.
Zvonimir Bandić: RISC-V … Read More
“Too Big To Fail Two” – Could chip failure take down tech & entire economy?
-Chips enable tech sector which underpins entire economy
-Is the US chip sector “Too Big To Fail”?
-If US chip industry fails, does tech & everything else follow?
-How chip/Taiwan crisis compares to 2008 financial meltdown
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
We find it an incredible juxtaposition… Read More
COVID Still Impacting Electronics
Electronics production has been volatile over the past two years primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Electronics production three-month-average change versus a year ago is shown below for key Asian countries. COVID-19 shutdowns affected production in early 2020. Trends in 2021 show a strong bounce back.
The key trends … Read More
Ramping Up Software Ideas for Hardware Design
This is a topic in which I have a lot of interest, covered in a panel at this year’s DAC; Raúl Camposano chaired the session. I had earlier covered a keynote by Moshe Zalcberg at Europe DVCon late in 2020; he now reprises the topic. Given the incredible pace of innovation and scale in software development these days, I don’t see what we… Read More
Top 10 Takeaways from DAC 2021
The “in-person” portion of the Design Automation Conference (DAC) was recently held in San Francisco. (As several presenters were unable to attend, a “virtual” program is also available.) The presentations spanned a wide gamut – e.g., technical advanced in design automation algorithms; new features in commercial EDA tools; … Read More
Semicon West is Semicon Less
- Semicon West was Semicon Less- Less Customers & Vendor
- Everyone is busy as can be, maybe too busy to attend
- Those who were there, talk about supply chain issues & stress
- How long does the party last & where the money comes from?
Semicon West was Semicon Less….
We attended a “Hybrid” version of Semicon… Read More
DAC 2021 – Accellera Panel all about Functional Safety Standards
Functional safety has been at the forefront of the electrification of our vehicles with new ADAS features, and the push to reach autonomous driving, while having compliance with the ISO 26262 functional safety standard. I attended the Accellera hosted panel discussion on Monday at DAC, hearing from functional safety panelists… Read More
Intel Discusses Scaling Innovations at IEDM
Standard Cell Scaling
Complex logic designs are built up from standard cells, in order to continue to scale logic we need to continually shrink the size of standard cells.
Figure 1 illustrates the dimensions of a standard cell.
Figure 1. Standard Cell Dimensions.
From figure 1 we can see that shrinking standard cell sizes requires… Read More


CES 2026 and all things Cycling